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Will The New 'Copyright Alert System' Actually Stop People From Downloading Music and Movies Illegally?

Starting this week, those downloading movies, TV shows and music illegally in the U.S. are going to start getting called out for committing Internet fouls. Copyright holders RIAA and MPAA in partnership with five major Internet service providers are launching the “Copyright Alert System” a.k.a. “Six Strikes” a.k.a. “The Copyright Surveillance Machine.” What does it mean?

If you get your Internet through AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable or Verizon and you’re one of the millions who prefer downloading Game of Thrones, Dexter, and the Big Bang Theory for free through illicit channels, you may get a letter from your ISP letting you know that your copyright transgression has been spotted by the copyright holders’ ref. The “ref” is Thomson Reuters-owned firm MarkMonitor, which has 100 employees in its anti-piracy group and a suite of automated tools for watching Torrent sites to catch the IP addresses sharing and downloading content.

“We see 20-30 million infringements every day,” said Thomas Sehested, who is in charge of antipiracy services and technology at MarkMonitor. “Most people are unaware of how public everything they do online is. Whether they download illegal software or post to their Twitter page, a lot of people are unaware of how public it is, if you’re looking for it.”

The RIAA and MPAA’s members tell MarkMonitor which shows, movies and songs to look for, and it then performs its monitoring magic and sends along shame lists to the ISPs. (Interestingly, the porn industry which has long complained of the toll of illegal downloading on its profits was left out of the Six Strikes deal.) Each ISP comes up with its own system for “gotcha” emails to their customers but they’ll generally go like this: Copyright scofflaws will get up to six warnings, that grow more and more dire — first offering educational opportunities (“Do you know what IP ownership is, little boy?”), then mandatory education (You must acknowledge that you know what copyright infringement is before you can access the Internet.), and finally punishment in the form of slowed Internet speed for two to three days. After six warnings, do the MPAA and RIAA storm troopers raid your house and smash your computer to bits? Nope, at that point they just assume that you’re not capable of reform and you stop getting warnings. Is this actually going to stop pirates from going after their entertaining digital booty?

The system was negotiated by industry group the Center for Copyright Information, which became the RIAA and MPAA’s only hope after the dramatic demise of SOPA/PIPA — legislation that would have forcibly enlisted advertisers, merchants and search providers in the fight against piracy. CCI, which has an unofficial but approving nod from the Obama administration, has an annual budget of up to $2 million jointly funded by the RIAA, MPAA and the participating ISPs. Its role, beyond working out the logistics of the system, is the creation of the educational materials for those slapped with a copyright dunce hat. The Center already helps six-year-olds in understanding copyright, says the center’s executive director Jill Lesser, providing educational materials that are distributed in schools.

“We’ll also collect and analyze the data to see whether the alerts are working,” says Lesser. “We’re hoping the vast majority of people who are not intent on being pirates will respond to this. Undergirding the process is taking the large percentage of casual infringers and educating them about where they can find legal content.”

In other words, CCI is hoping to teach people not to search for “free download of Walking Dead” and click on the first site that turns up, and instead turn to Amazon or iTunes.

Will it work? We often incorrectly think that what we’re doing on the Internet is seen by no one. Simply getting notified that your illegal downloading has caught someone’s eye could be a deterrent. Many academic studies have found that the act of being watched makes us better citizens, so much so that just putting “eye” stickers on a tip jar makes us more likely to fork over some cash. Perhaps the warning system will work not because of fear of having slow Internet for a couple of days but because of the sensation of surveillance that the system will create. And if nothing else, it might notify people with open Wi-Fi that other people are jumping on their network for questionable downloading purposes.

“I think it’s going to be reasonably effective,” says Ernesto (who goes by that name alone), editor in chief of TorrentFreak, a website that covers pirate news and has been covering Six Strikes since talk of it first surfaced in 2011. “For consumers, it’s not a bad thing. I think there are a lot of casual downloaders who do it because it’s easy. A big group of those will be scared if they get these messages and will stop. They won’t know how to prevent these messages or not get caught.”

Those who profess to be innocent can challenge their warnings in hopes of not having their Internet slowed down. There’s an arbitration process to challenge a warning — say if you in fact had the right to distribute the file or if the file falls under fair use — that costs $35; if you win the case, that fee gets reimbursed.

It’ll be interesting to see if it works — or if it just results in a flood of users to services like Kim Dotcom’s Mega, where private cyberlockers make for less transparent media consumption. Regardless, it’s an interesting voluntary partnership between rights holders and Internet service providers, given the failure of enacting legislation around this, and gives copyright holders a way to communicate — if indirectly — with the people consuming their content for free online.

Correction (March 1): This post was edited to make a correction and a clarification. MarkMonitor is owned by Thomson Reuters not Reuters. A sentence was clarified to make clear that the company has 100 employees in its anti-piracy group, not 100 employees total.

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Ironic that the ISP’s are involved in this since it is how they make their money by allowing it to happen as long as you read their banner ad before the start of your movie! It will never work. People that can’t afford the entertainment will always find a way to get it for free.

This won’t work. I like stealing from the Liberals in Hollywood. If I bought the stuff, I’d just be giving them more money to Contribute to Democrats who are Destroying this country, so out of Love for my country, I refuse to make these people any money. The Liberals in the Entertainment Industry Rant against Capitalism all the time, so screw those Socialist bums.

My cable bill is part of a package that includes my internet and home phone. I pay $80/m and, sadly, only get basic channels, 1/4 of them in HD but none of the good channels like AMC, HBO, Showcase or even FX.

My cable provider will also an upgrade for an additional $20/m to get Showcase and AMC but for HBO, that’s an additional $20/m, so it would be an additional $40 a month (or a 50% increase of my current bill) just to get AMC, Showcase and HBO.

However, the same cable company offers unlimited internet for only $10/m more, so isn’t the logical solution to spend $10/m only to download all the content I would be paying $40/m more each month?

Cable companies who offer unlimited downloading yet charge more each month for premium channels are really just playing the shell game right now. They are trying to appease the consumers to not leave them (for smaller ISP’s) but trying to appease Hollywood and the TV networks in offering their shows to consumers for a fair price. It’s a never ending battle… download free TV’s shows or pay through the nose for the right to watch them live. Until the cable companies and Hollywood/TV industry gets together to figure this all out, downloading will still be done by millions of people.

thats right, food prices rising, gas, rent, transportation. no raises, hard to find a job that pays descent, jobs going over seas. isp’s same ones coming up with this rule are screwing us over with there false speeds and bandwidth for the price we pay for the internet. the hell with this rule.

Revolt against anything that has to do with intellectual property. Having people own ideas is wrong, and it makes us worse off. Think about. I know it only seems like a song here and a movie there but, if you have an idea that no one can add onto who does that help in the long-run?

Wow a bunch of people are going to be switching providers soon. Its actually illegal for the internet providers to throttle the internet connection anyway but hey, whatever lawsuits they think they can pay for is completely up to the providers. I don’t Pirate if you can call file sharing pirating but if I were ever to find that my provider throttled the internet connection I paid for, I would drop them like a hot rock! And I know I’m not alone! Just another stupid law to try and control people and what they can and cant buy! Almost as bad as our Government!

Interesting concept, so they are trying to claim that visiting any site on the internet is to be considered a public space so nothing is private. No one can condone downloading this material, but the idea that your ISP can willingly monitor every site you go and monitor that is problematic to say the least.